Blue Eyed Ennis: Mark Dowd

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UPDATE Friday Fish Caught In The Net March 2013 Catholic Issues

There's certainly been a lot caught in the net this last week.

Here you go...

Top 10 reasons why this conclave to elect Pope Benedict's successor is different from here.
- A profile of each Cardinal Elector in Papabile Of The Day.
  You have to scroll down the page.
"Which Catholic Church?" by Paul Kennedy From The New York Times.

Final paragraph below:

"But no one launching an attack upon the papal elections, Vatican finances, sexism and the rest should think that they are attacking Catholicism per se. From my perspective, our Catholic Church is vibrant, helpful, intellectual, and working in so many ways to fulfill the message to love God and to love, and reach out to, one’s unknown neighbor. Everything else is, well, footnotes."

A few of my own thoughts :

The article above supplies some balance in the face of a deluge of bad press, but I don't think what is happening in the church is a footnote; more a necessary prelude to the need for deep seated change and reform.

From the BBC World Service Series, Hard Talk , Zeinab Badawi speaks challengingly to Father Bernard Lynch, one of a few openly gay Catholic priests. How will the church recover from these embarrassing blows at a time of historic transition?

Excellent Video interview can be seen by clicking here.

A few more articles well worth a read........

Mark Dowd writes about Archbishop Keith O' Brien's resignation in The UK Guardian "What Lies Behind Religious Homophobia ?" from here.

Extract below:

"The coming to light of these tales is a positive development. "Methinks the lady doth protest" is a well worn cliche, but from here on in, those who seek to cover their own guilty tracks by the uncharitable nature of their words know that a watching public is getting wiser to some of the unfortunate mind games that have been played out over the decades."

******UPDATE *****

This is a follow up article in this Saturday's Guardian ( 02.03.13) on Archbishop Keith O'Brien, by the reporter who dealt with the story from the beginning.

Joanna Moorhead writes in her article in the Guardian here : The Crimes Of The Catholic Church: Not In Our Names."

Prof Tina Beattie locks horns with Ray Flynn on World Radio . Listen here. (It's in the first part of the programme.)

Click here for an article by theologian Leonardo Boff, who makes many excellent points in this personal analysis and response to the Papacy of Benedict XVI . It is incisive and without rancour.

Australia Catholica Magazine has a three part commentary examining the legacy of Pope Benedict XVI from Canadian academic Dr Julius-Kei Kato. Again, seemingly serendipitously, it arrives amidst a heightened conversation on their forum about the nature and pursuit of truth.

The perennial question asked by Pilate of Jesus is "What is truth?"
Dr Kato explores "What has been Benedict's truth"; and has it been the correct
interpretation ?

Click here for the first part.

Click here to access parts two and three

Click here for an excellent article by James Hanvey SJ from America magazine. titled "The Shape Of The Church To Come and Reflections On Where We Are Going."

Hans Kung reflects on and urges A Vatican Spring here.

Trials of a Pope, UPDATE; Speeches and Welcome from PM

I've just watched the Mark Dowd TV programme, Trials Of A Pope and I found it excellent. Hurray: at last a programme worth watching !!

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE WHOLE PROGRAMME ( one hour long)

Now back to the Media tracking :

According to the Catholic Herald the most awaited and important speech by Pope Benedict will be at The Palace of Westminster

You can read why here
Prime Minister David Cameron welcomes the Pope in this video

and ITV sums up the pros and cons of the visit

Excellent Stuff from Mark Dowd

Better get those TV dinners ready .Two programmes worth watching tonight

This article from filmmaker and award winning journalist Mark Dowd

was commissioned to run alongside his authored documentary on Benedict XVI, Benedict: Trials of a Pope,

It's on BBC 2 TV tonight. Wednesday 15th September 7-8pm.

His excellent radio programme: In The Pope's British Divisions, broadcast last Thursday on BBC Radio 4 can also be heard again for a short time on BBC iPlayer.

Mark Dowd also gave the inaugural Independent Catholic News lecture from Monday night at Heythrop College, in London, on the subject of Pope Benedict and the Media.

The event marked ICN's tenth birthday . Around 150 people attended including clergy, religious and leaders of Church organisations from the UK and abroad. In his introductory comments, Fr John McDade SJ, Principle of Heythrop praised ICN's "ten years of service to the truth".

The text of Mark Dowd's lecture can be read here here

If you can stand any more there is also
BBC 4 documentary : Vatican The Hidden World at 9-10pm tonight:

which says in the blurb "To mark the Papal visit to the UK, a camera crew have spent a year filming a world that few have ever seen. With unprecedented access to the Vatican and the people who live and work there, this is a unique profile of the heart of the Catholic Church and the world's smallest Sovereign State.

Two BBC Programmes on The Pope Worth Your Time

The award-winning Catholic journalist Mark Dowd, who is giving the inaugural Independent Catholic News lecture at Heythrop College next Monday evening, will be presenting two radio and television programmes about the Church over the next few days.

In The Pope's British Divisions, this Thursday, 9th September at 9am and again at 9pm, on BBC Radio 4, he will investigate changes in Britain's Catholic community since the last Papal visit in 1982, and the consequences of these changes for wider society.

He will ask if the Church's once-strong liberal wing is becoming a minority as British Catholics heed Benedict's call for a smaller, purer church and he will examine the influence of the Catholic Church on public life in the UK.

As Mark tests the fault lines of British Catholic identity, he visits a Vatican-approved Mass for gay Catholics and meets fellow Catholics who want this special Mass to be shut down. He investigates the new breed of 'Radical Traditionalists' who campaign for traditional Latin church rites and are scathing of modern 'pick and mix' Catholicism; and he talks to their liberal opponents who fear a conservative takeover of their Church.

In Benedict: Trials Of A Pope on BBC Two, at 7pm, next Wednesday, 15 September, Mark Dowd goes in search of the real Joseph Ratzinger.

This is a man who was the darling of liberals in the Second Vatican Council but who is now the champion of traditionalists.

This is a journey that takes him from the papal homeland of Bavaria to the heart of the Vatican itself. Mark will explore how the current clerical abuse crisis has dogged the Pope's mission to combat western secularism.

The programme also features a rare interview with the Pope's brother, Georg Ratzinger, who tells the BBC how his brother has been affected by recent scandals.

Mark also profiles the recently formed Catholic media group 'Catholic Voices'.

Both programmes should also be available online on the BBC's playback facility.

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More from Seamus Heaney

“History says, Don't hope
On this side of the grave,
But then, once in a lifetime,
The longest-for tidal wave of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea change
On the far side of revenge
Believe in miracles....”

“The aim of poetry and the poet is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual into the larger work of the community as a whole.” ―

“I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.”

and five more......

On his inspiration: 'The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis”

On which animal he'd prefer to be: "I might enjoy being an albatross, being able to glide for days and daydream for hundreds of miles along the thermals. And then being able to hang like an affliction round some people's necks."

On fame: "The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful, to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself. The prizes can’t help you at all.”

On becoming a poet: "My quest for precision and definition, while it may lead backward, is conducted in the living speech of a landscape and a language that I was born with. If you like, I began as a poet when my roots were crossed with my reading."

On authority "At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure. "

Easter Hope All Year Round

Celestial spirit that doth roll
The heart's sepulchral stone away,
Be this our resurrection day,
The singing Easter of the soul -
O gentle Master of the Wise,
Teach us to say: "I will arise." ~
Richard Le Gallienne

"The great gift of Easter is hope - Christian hope which makes us have that confidence in God, in his ultimate triumph, and in his goodness and love, which nothing can shake."
-- Basil C. Hume

Celtic Christianity may offer us a lifeline in the form of an approach to faith which is rooted in the imagination...[Celts] excelled at expressing their faith in symbols, metaphors and images, both visual and poetic.
They had the ability to invest the ordinary and commonplace with sacramental significance, to find glimpses of God’s glory throughout creation and to paint pictures in words, signs and music that acted as icons opening windows on heaven and pathways to eternity
Ian Bradley The Celtic Way

Favourite Quotes from Pope Francis

“Thanks to magnanimity, we can always look at the horizon from the position where we are. That means being able to do the little things of every day with a big heart open to God and to others. That means being able to appreciate the small things inside large horizons, those of the kingdom of God.

This offers parameters to assume a correct position for discernment, in order to hear the things of God from God’s ‘point of view.’ … However the risk in seeking and finding God in all things, then, is the willingness to explain too much, to say with human certainty and arrogance: ‘God is here.’ We will find only a god that fits our measure. The correct attitude is that of St. Augustine: seek God to find him, and find God to keep searching for God forever.”

-- Pope Francis

Carlo Caretto's Love Letter to His Church

How much I much criticise you my church and yet how much I love you !

You have made me suffer more than anyone and yet I owe you more than I owe anyone. I should like to see you destroyed and yet I need your presence.

You have given me much scandal and yet you alone have made me understand holiness. Never in the world have I seen anything more obscurantist, more compromised, more false, yet never have I touched anything more pure, more generous or more beautiful.

Countless times I have felt like slamming the door of my soul in your face – and yet, every night, I have prayed that I might die in your arms!

No, I cannot be free of you, for I am one with you, even if not completely you.
Then too – where should I go? To build another church?

But I cannot build another church without the same defects, for they are my own defects. And again, if I were to build another church, it would be my church, not Christ’s church. No, I am old enough. I know better!"

Did the Woman Say ?

Great Quotes

A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God.

Sidney Sheldon

There are things you can’t reach. But
you can reach out to them, and all day long.
The wind, the bird flying away. The idea of God.
And it can keep you as busy as anything else, and happier.

Mary Oliver

“A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.”

– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"There is an Indian proverb or axiom that says that everyone is a house with four rooms, a physical, a mental, an emotional, and a spiritual. Most of us tend to live in one room most of the time but, unless we go into every room every day, even if only to keep it aired, we are not a complete person."

~Rumer Godden, A House with Four Rooms, 1989

“And

"
"You can get all A's and still flunk life."

"Lost in the mystery of finding myself alive."

Walker Percy

"The day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom”

A tough life needs a tough language-and that's what poetry is. That's what literature offers- a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.
Jeanette Winterson

There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, “All right, then, have it your way.”

- C.S. Lewis

The independent hearts of Celtic descendents everywhere still yearn for the solitary place, still rejoice in the goodness of creation, still see the Lord beside them as they walk, still see Him in the face of friend and stranger. The gospel light with its eastern fire still gleams. The truth still lingers in the heart.
Pat Robson – The Celtic Heart

People are itchy and lost and bored and quick to jump at any fix. Why is there such a vast self-help industry in this country? Why do all these selves need help?

They have been deprived of something by our psychological culture. They have been deprived of the sense that there is something else in life, some purpose that has come with them into the world."

-- James Hillman

Loyalty to the country always. Loyalty to the government only when it deserves it.
--Mark Twain

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
--George Orwell

We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice: - we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
-- George Orwell

Never for the sake of peace and quiet deny your own experience or convictions.
--Dag Hammarskjöld

If you want to build a ship don't herd people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupery

For what are we, without hope in our hearts, that someday we'll drink from God's blessed waters?"
-Bruce Springsteen

"Sometimes grace works like waterwings when you feel you are sinking."
-Anne Lamott

"A prayer may be a wordless inner longing, a sudden outpouring of love, a yearning within the soul to be for a moment united within the infinite and the good, a humbleness that needs no abasement or speech to express it, a cry in the darkness for help when all seems lost, a song, a poem, a kind deed, a reaching for beauty, or the strong, quiet inner reaffirmation of faith. A prayer in fact can be anything that is created by God that turns to God."

Paul Gallico

"God does not die when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illuminated by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason."

Dag Hammarskjold

When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world.”

― Paul Hawken

The greatest religious challenge of our age is to hold together social action and spiritual disciplines. This is not just a theological necessity, dictated by the need to integrate all of life around the reality of the living God. It is a matter of sheer survival. The evils we confront are so massive, so inhuman, so impervious to appeals and dead to compassion, that those who struggle against them face the real possibility of being overwhelmed by them.”

~ Theologian Walter Wink

One day you will ask me which is more important? My life or yours?
I will say mine and you will walk away not knowing that you are my life.

~ Khalil Gibran

Blue Eyed Ennis

UPDATE Friday Fish Caught In The Net March 2013 Catholic Issues

Top 10 reasons why this conclave to elect Pope Benedict's successor is different from here.

Trials of a Pope, UPDATE; Speeches and Welcome from PM

Excellent Stuff from Mark Dowd

Two BBC Programmes on The Pope Worth Your Time

Disclaimer for Links

Disclaimer

UPDATE Friday Fish Caught In The Net March 2013 Catholic Issues

Top 10 reasons why this conclave to elect Pope Benedict's successor is different from here.

Trials of a Pope, UPDATE; Speeches and Welcome from PM

Excellent Stuff from Mark Dowd

Two BBC Programmes on The Pope Worth Your Time

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Disclaimer for Links

Disclaimer